Wednesday, #23: what a mess

Today is messy. Germany’s latest bond auction (i.e. Germany needed to borrow money) was dubbed disastrous by more or less every news source (nobody wanted to buy bunds). That’s a bad sign, because it means the eurocrisis is creeping up to Berlin. Essentially all other [10-year] yields were rising, with Belgium standing at 5.21% and Italy and Spain at 6.87% and 6.68% respectively. Great. The Belgian rise was caused by new worries about Dexia. The French-Belgian bank received a capital injection from its home countries in September, after having been bailed out for the first time in 2008. Now it turns out that the September-bailout hasn’t really been successful and that puts a lot of pressure on France’s unstable AAA-rating.

In Athens, the Greek central bank has released a report this morning mentioning the possibility of a disorderly exit from the euro in the event that the latest bailout tranche of €130bn proves to be unsuccessful. read article Find the press release here.

At the same time, the Bank of England is considering more measures of quantitative easing (pumping money into the economy), even though worries about inflation are pretty prevalent. read article

Felix Salmon, as witty as ever, wonders about austerity measures and contagion (not the movie), accompanied by a pretty hilarious video: read article

Technology-genealogy: Apple could become the largest PC vendor by mid-2012, depending on the definition of PC… read article

Mathew Ingram of Businessweek is just as annoyed with a cluttered Facebook newsfeed because you now know the entire Spotify playlist of that girl you sat next to in that class in your undergrad as you are. An article on sharing: read article